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Back in March, Facebook introduced a new feature that wasnt exactly new. The Friends tabdescribed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a throwback to OG Facebookis a way for the apps users to see only the latest posts from friends, and none of the algorithm-recommended content otherwise dominating their feeds. Personal social networking, once Facebooks core product, had finally been relegated to a nostalgic lark its users could whimsically opt into. Less than a month later, with its years-in-the-making antitrust trial, the Federal Trade Commission sought to prove Metas early-2010s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp gave it a monopoly on personal social networking sites. Over the course of the trials six weeks, Metas defense emerged: a precise accounting of why Facebooks new Friends feature feels so quaint and retro. As detailed in a just-released post-trial brief, Metas argument is that it cant possibly have a monopoly on personal social networkingbecause personal social networking no longer meaningfully exists. Thats entirely due to the way people now use Facebook and Instagram, with most of them drawn to what Meta calls unconnected content, from accounts users dont even follow. The protracted legal battle began in December 2020, when the FTC filed its lawsuit against Meta in conjunction with 46 states. The agency claimed Meta had scooped up smaller social startups like Instagram to extinguish their threat to its supremacy, and used the reach of its platforms to slow down user growth among competitors. (Less compelling for the FTC, apparently, were the instances in which Meta allegedly just copied features from the companies it didnt acquire.) Unfortunately for the FTC, the lawsuit began taking shape right as TikTok was enjoying the kind of explosive growth that Metas monopoly is meant to have made impossible, and right as that growths seismic impact on the entire social media landscape settled in. The FTCs idea of social media is outdated In its earliest days, Facebook was all about connection, rather than content. People used it to build digital rapport with new friends, get back in touch with old ones, and keep tabs on crushes. Gradually, though, the sites News Feed began absorbing more and more of the greater internet around it, to discourage users from ever leaving. Even before TikToks For You page hit social media like a nonchronological atom bomb, Meta seemed to realize that content relevance was driving engagement more than friendship strength, and began peppering in unconnected posts that algorithmically matched user interest. TikToks ascendance merely accelerated the shift toward unconnected-ness. Log into Facebook in 2025, perhaps to search for a used couch on Marketplace, and what awaits between updates from friends is a heady brew of sponsored posts, straight-up ads, dispatches from various celebrities and politicians, and, yes, a bottomless well of short-form video content. The significance of Metas evolution, though, seems lost on the FTC. The agency has worked itself into contortions to argue that Metas primary offering is still personal social networking, and that Meta isnt competing against TikTok or YouTube. In its opening statement, the FTC narrowly defined the market for its antitrust case, citing Meta competitors as insignificant as BeReal and MeWe, while excluding obvious peers such as X and TikTok, along with YouTube. With this puzzlingly limited definition of the services Facebook and Instagram provide, the FTC claims Metas market share of personal social networking sites amounts to 78% of all monthly active users and 85% of time spent in-app. That assertion holds water, however, only if the mid-aughts version of social media were still a market any of these apps is currently competing to dominate. During the trial, the FTC thoroughly emphasized TikTok and YouTubes disinterest in friend sharing as a means of differentiating them from Metas apps. Adam Presser, who leads operations at TikTok, testified that only around 1% of users time on TikTok is spent on the apps Friends tab. (The company only keeps that feature around, he claimed, in hopes that it might eventually enhance users experience in some way.) The FTC further revealed during the trial the failure of YouTubes mid-2010s experiments with adding social features like private messaging, and that YouTube has since abandoned friend-sharing as a goal. If anything, the FTC may have been too convincing in its portrayal of the short-form video giants indifference toward friend sharing. By doing so, the agency left an opening for Meta to argue why its own apps are now similarly inclined. Peoples habits have shifted away from friend sharing In its posttrial brief, Meta reveals the full extent to which it was rattled by TikToks late-2010s success with both short-form video and AI recommendations, which the company claims slowed user growth for both Facebook and Instagram. Meta consequently made a major strategic shift to respond to competition, the brief states. It invested billions of dollars to develop its own AI-recommendation algorithms to rival TikTok and introduced a new feature (called Reels) to serve the demonstrated consumer demand that was shifting away from friend sharing. The document goes on to mention that a Meta executive, whose name and title are redacted, has been paying creators hundreds of millions of dollars to secure exclusive content for Instagram. For better or worse, to suggest that Meta has not been competing in the arms race for unconnected video content is to deny reality. At the same time, Metas users have demonstrably gravitated to content over connection. The posttrial brief cites a 2023 experiment to determine what most engages Facebook users. Upon increasing friend-original content in users fees by 20%, the company reported that users began spending less time on the app. When Meta took the opposite tact, however, serving more short-form video content instead, users stayed locked in longer. Skip ahead to 2025 and Meta now claims users spend only 7% of their time on Instagram and 17% of their time on Facebook consuming content from online friends. Social media as an industry is now more than 20 years old. At the time Facebook first hit critical mass, adults may have been thrilled with the novelty of being digitally linked to so many friends and acquaintances. Zoomers, on the other hand, have grown up with social media and have been able to choose whether and how to connect online with friends their entire lives. Many now seem to prefer doing so in group chats and messaging apps. If they come to Facebook at all these days, many apparently do so as yet another means of consuming content. According to Metas posttrial brief, The number of new young adult monthly active users with zero friends after 90 days on Facebook has increased from only 8% to 10% in 2012 to nearly 50% today. In retrospect, Meta may have rolled out its OG Facebook-style Friends tab less than a month before the antitrust trial began just to prove how uninterested todays users are in friend sharing. The posttrial brief cites, in its as-yet-unsealed evidence, de minimis usage of the new dedicated Friends Tab as confirmation that the puck is moving elsewhere. Where social media goes from here is yet to be determined So, where is social media heading? There are plenty of hints in where it already ismuch of them having to do with AI. Social apps are currently inundated with all manner of AI slop. A Cornell University study found that during the 2024 election about 12% of images and 1.4% of text posts on X were AI-generated. More recently, TikTok has seen a surge in AI-generated video contentwith a clip of bunnies on trampolines, created by Google Veo 3, garnering more than 230 million views on the app this summer. And beyond the AI that users are posting to these apps, the platforms have been experimenting with AI chatbots as a new form of friend to connect with. So far, the results have been decidedly mixed. Back in March, for instance, a Facebook Messenger chatbot named Big sis Billie reportedly lured a cognitively impaired man to a physical address across state lines. The man tripped and fell along the way, ultimately dying from his injuries. Early on in the antitrust trial, Zuckerberg described his vision of social medias future. Despite the relative failures of the Metaverse and Apple Vision Pro recently, the Meta CEO predicted the rise of increasingly immersive content beyond video, claiming, were just about due for this next major transition to smart glasses that blend the physical and digital world together. It remains to be seen, though, how much consumer demand exists for social media to become more like an augmented reality game. Perhaps the future of social media is group chat apps like Geneva, Internet 1.0-aping social magazines like Perfectly Imperfect, or subscription-based micro-communities on Patreon built around shared interests in a podcast or creator. On a long enough timeline, though, every done-to-death trend becomes ripe for renewal. (See: our reboot-filled box office, or Ubers obsession with reinventing the bus.) It may just be a matter of time before user fatigue from connecting with people across disparate sites and apps leads a Silicon Valley wunderkind to bring everyone together in a massive digital community. Sort of like a social network.
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E-Commerce
Another month, another founder accused of fraud. This time its Christine Hunsicker of CaaStle, indicted on July 18 for allegedly falsifying financial records, misrepresenting profits, and continuing fraud even after her removal by the board. According to reports, before meeting with an audit firm, she searched online for the terms fraud, created an audit firm fake, and JP morgan 4m records fakedan apparent reference to fraud charges related to yet another disgraced founder, Charlie Javice of Frank. These incidents are no longer outliers. Theyre becoming a pattern, and the startup world has yet to confront what that the pattern reveals: The startup ecosystem is designed to encourage deception. Risk-taking and self-confidence We all know that most founders share a penchant for risk-taking and a healthy sense of self-confidence. But couple these characteristics with the relentless assault of pressures that constitute daily startup life, and you have a recipe for trouble. Risk-taking slips into recklessness, and confidence metastasizes into outright narcissism. Lying is the norm. Particularly during the early stages, a Growth at All Costs imperative means that startups feel obliged to pursue aggressive growth to secure high valuations and attract continuous investment rounds. This pressure can lead founders to inflate metrics, fabricate success, or conceal failures to maintain investor confidence. Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX secretly transferred customer funds to his trading firm, Alameda Research, concealing these movements and misleading stakeholders. From optimism to deception A Fake It Till You Make It culture means that what starts as harmless optimism can easily escalate into deliberate deception. Founders initially omit negative details, then progressively falsify data to uphold illusions of success. Nikola founder Trevor Milton exaggerated product capabilities, even staging videos of a nonoperational electric truck rolling down a hill. The brutal demands of fundraising result in constant pressure to secure funding and maintain operational cash flow, which often pushes founders to compromise ethically. The necessity to present a highly favorable narrative to investors encourages fraudulent embellishments. Combined with a lack of oversight and governance, especially in early-stage startups, this leaves founders unchecked, increasing opportunities for fraud. Early investors and boards often fail to provide rigorous oversight due to limited motivation or expertise. A gradual process White-collar fraud is always a gradual process. No one jumps straight into the deep end of the criminality pool. Law enforcement officials have a 10:10:80 rule of thumb when it comes to white-collar fraud: 10% of people would never commit fraud, 10% of people are actively seeking out opportunities to commit fraud, and 80% of people have the potential to commit fraud if the timing and circumstances are right. The vast majority of these founders probably started in the 80%, along with most of the rest of us. It often begins with minor embellishments aimed at securing initial investment. Successful deception attracts further funding, creating a self-reinforcing cycle. But as the discrepancies between reality and claims widen, founders face intensified pressure to maintain their narratives, resorting to increasingly severe fraud to conceal earlier lies. Witness Christine Hunsickers continued deception even after her board had essentially kicked her out of her company. Seismic consequences The consequences of all this founder misbehavior can be cataclysmic. They extend well beyond the direct financial losses to investors. Broader investor confidence deteriorates, leading to reduced funding availability for legitimate startups. Employees suffer job losses, reputational damage, and psychological distress. Customers can experience direct harm, as in Theranoss false medical test results. The broader innovation ecosystem becomes risk-averse, slowing innovation due to increased regulatory scrutiny and cautious investment behaviors. Potential time bombs To mitigate this deadly cocktail of ego and pressure, we first need to understand that all founders are potential time bombs: the same traits that help them secure money, talent, and press are the ones that can eventually lead to their undoing. The old method was pretty straightforward: fire the founder, and replace them with a manager. But that only leads to zombie companies that stifle innovation in the crib. Startup founders are constantly being gaslit. Theyre being flattered as geniuses and world-changers on a daily basis. Many of their direct reports are sharp, canny careerists who only want to share good news. Its easy to see how people can lose perspective and start believing their own hype within the emperors new clothes environment of a startup. These people need perspective in order to curb the worst tendencies of startup culture. Every founder should cultivate a star chamber of mentors who are removed from the everyday persecutions of the startup in question (perhaps an older CEO, or a colleague from an accelerator program, or a startup blogger you admire). They need advice from people whom I call models of values: transparency, accountability, and ethical leadership. Many boards are sadly hopeless at this, because theyre complicit in the success (at all costs) of the startup. Oversight and accountability On the stick side of the carrot and stick approach, however, these people also need oversight and accountability. Their boards and investors must actively engage in governance roles, monitoring company practices and demanding transparency. They need to ensure financial transparency and operational integrity through audits and detailed reference checks. To prevent the next Hunsicker, Javice, Bankman-Fried, or Holmes, we need to confront the cultural rot at the core of startup life. We still need ambitious entrepreneurs to drive innovation, but not within a system that rewards deception and punishes transparency. Unless we change the rules of the gameby rethinking incentives, strengthening oversight, and investing in founder developmentwell keep producing brilliant visionaries who become cautionary tales.
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E-Commerce
In 1967, a man named George Maciunas purchased a cast-off building at 80 Wooster Street in New York City. It had once housed light manufacturing, but by the late 1960s, it was empty, like much of SoHo. Maciunas was an artist and a bit of a provocateur. What he wanted to build wasnt a home or studio. It was a community. And within a few years, 80 Wooster had become a nerve center for Fluxus, the revolutionary movement that fused performance art and design. You could argue that much of SoHos creative explosion, and the contemporary art market that followed, traces back, at least partially, to that one building. But the real lesson of SoHo isnt about one building. Its about what happens when people live and work and think together, in close proximity. Its about density. Shared space. Its about what Maciunas stumbled upon and what Jony Ive, half a century later, is trying to design deliberately in San Francisco. During the pandemic, we collectively adopted a belief: that physical place doesnt matter anymore. That knowledge workers could work from anywhere, that Slack could replace the hallway conversation, that Zoom could replace the studio. But in shared spaces, powerful ideas emerge from the combustion that happens when thinkers and doers comingle. You see someones sketchpad. You hear someone pitch a prototype. You walk out of a gallery and into a conversation. Communities have always been engines of creative cross-pollination and acceleration. And they still are. Lets look at the evidence. Proximity Shapes Behavior When the Bauhaus school moved to Dessau in 1925, its new campus was a compound: a deliberate arrangement of workshops, student housing, dining areas, and design studios, all connected by a spatial logic that encouraged flow and interaction. Masters and students worked together, ate together, debated design over dinner together, and crossed paths in shared hallways and courtyards. The schools interdisciplinary breakthroughs (think of Breuers tubular steel chairs or Moholy-Nagys experiments in photography and metalwork) didnt come from curriculum alone. They emerged from proximity. The architecture itself, featuring transparency, openness, and connectedness, was a catalyst for creative exchange. We know from research that proximity changes behavior. MIT professor Thomas Allen found that communication between engineers dropped off sharply once they were more than 10 meters apart and declined even further across floors or buildings. Weekly collaboration often disappeared entirely. The closer we are, the more we interact. And the more we interact, the more likely we are to spark something new. So, what does that mean for the world we live in now? Renewal in San Francisco and Detroit Jackson Square in San Francisco, once a lively mix of galleries, boutiques, and creative firms, hollowed out after the pandemic. Office vacancy topped 35%, and much of downtown lost its pulse. But Jony Ive saw possibilities where others saw decline. Rather than lease a studio, he began acquiring and renovating a cluster of adjacent historic buildings. Why? Because he was, and is, on a design mission: how do you build a space that invites creativity, not just from your team, but from your surroundings? He called the resulting courtyard the Pavilion. And its not an office amenity. Its a place for open-air meals, impromptu conversations, private concerts, and more. Yo-Yo Ma has played there. Artists, technologists, and musicians mingle without an agenda. Conceivably a typographer might walk out of a meeting and stumble into a sound check. A hardware engineer might trade notes with a novelist over espresso. This is cross-pollination by design. Ive is building a creative ecology: a space where disciplines intersect, where proximity builds trust, and where inspiration moves laterally, not from the top down, but from the courtyard across. A contemporary answer to an old truth: ideas need neighbors. Jackson Square is not the only place where revitalization is happening through the communal sharing of ideas. Detroits Newlab anchors the citys 30acre mobility innovation district. Its built around the newly reopened Michigan Central Station, hailed as a symbol of Detroits creative revival. Since opening in April 2023, Newlab has housed more than 100 startups in mobility, climate tech, and hardware innovation, providing access to stateoftheart prototyping labs, fabrication workshops, and pilot zones designed to facilitate realworld experimentation. Newlab is both a workspace and a community. In June 2025, Michigan Central and Newlab launched a Creative Residency funded by the Knight Foundation, placing artists alongside technologists to explore projects at the intersection of art, science, and mobility. Fellows and Cohort members engage in crossdisciplinary prototyping, installations, and public dialogues, weaving creative practice into the heart of criticaltech innovation. On-site facilities like textile, CNC, robotics, and metal labs mean that a sculptor can dart between a fabrication session and a conversation with a batterydesign engineer. These are unplanned collaborations that spark fresh ideas. That creative density scales into impact. Through Detroits Advanced Aerial Innovation Region, startups like Lamarr.AI use drones and AI to audit city-owned buildings, capturing thermal inefficiencies and structural data for retrofit in days, not weeks. The project demonstrates how shared infrastructure and pilot zones accelerate meaningful collaboration between companies, municipal agencies, and innovators all within walking distance of Newlabs shared hub. What This Means for Businesses This isnt just about San Francisco and Detroit. Any business that depends on ideas should care where those ideas come from, and the lessons we can learn from the power of place. Talent Clusters Deliver. Designers in Barcelona. Engineers in Boston. Founders in Austin. When talent lives near other talent, new work gets made. The people who shape culture still gather in physical places. Cities with culture, density, and walkability will continue to pull ahead. Creative Adjacency Is a Multiplier. You dont need to be in the same company. You just need to be in the same neighborhood. Thats why companies moving into innovation districts perform well. The serendipity is built in. Participation Is More Powerful Than Presence. Renting office space in a city isnt the same as showing up for its cultural life. Businesses that attend local shows, sponsor creative spaces, or mentor local talent become part of the ecosystem. Thats how you stay relevant, by being part of the local rhythm, not just watching it. Dont Mistake Remote for Rootless. Remote work lets people live anywhere. That doesnt mean they live everywhere. Creative people still gravitate toward vibrant places, and businesses that want to hire or partner with them need to think the same way. If you want to find the next generation of storytellers or technologists, look for the places where ideas are already in motion. Culture Is Not a KPI. You cant track the power of culture on a dashboard. But you know when its there. In the right place, ideas sync faster. Instinct sharpens. Teams move with more confidence That matters, especially for work that doesnt come from templates like good brand work, new product ideas, original strategies. These things dont arrive fully formed in a shared doc. They emerge from conversation, curiosity, and experience. All three live in places with creative density. The Texture of Innovation In business, we often talk about innovation as if its a matter of systems: of process, of capital, of talent deployed efficiently. But that language leaves something out. It misses the texture of innovation, the way it moves through a neighborhood, picks up influence, and reshapes itself in conversation. It forgets that the most important ideas emerge, slowly, from an atmosphere. From a shared block, a corner café, a sunlit studio, a courtyard where someone plays cello in the afternoon. If companies want to matter, not just to markets, but to culture, they need to rethink place as something more than a backdrop. It is not a container. It is an ingredient. A brand built in isolation may be polished. A product designed in a vacuum may be efficient. But timeless relevance, the kind that resonates, that sticks, that spreads, comes from being in the world with others. The real opportunity in front of us is not a return to offices. Its to ask better questions about what kind of places we want to build around the work we do, and what kind of work becomes possible when we do.
Category:
E-Commerce
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